Various applications may involve transferring power and data through a galvanic isolation barrier of, for example, several kilovolts. Systems used in the industrial field (e.g., high-side gate drivers), the medical field (e.g., implantable devices), in isolated sensor interfaces and lighting may be exemplary of such applications.
These isolated systems may be designed to provide galvanic isolation in the range of 2-10 kV. Dynamic isolation in the order of several tens of kV/μs may also be a desired feature, for example in order to handle rapid shifts in the ground references. Parasitic capacitive couplings between isolated units, such as interfaces, may lead these ground shifts to result in the injection of a common-mode current, ICM. The injected current may in turn produce dangerous overvoltages and/or data transmission errors so that undesired degradation of Bit Error Rate (BER) may ensue.
Such a current ICM may include a dc component proportional both to the parasitic capacitance of the isolation barrier, CP, and to the (maximum) voltage slew rate, dVCM/dt, between two isolated units, i.e., ICM=CP dVCM/dt. The current ICM may also convey high-frequency harmonics.
Common-mode transient immunity (CMTI) defines the maximum voltage slew rate (dV/dt) between two isolated interfaces that an isolated system is able to withstand.
There is a need in the art to address the drawbacks outlined in the foregoing, by facilitating achieving constant common mode transient immunity (CMTI) performance, for example, at increasing data rates.